Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi has told Destructoid that Resident Evil was not an easy game to remaster in HD. Speaking of the challenges that his team had to encounter, he talked about the difficulty in attempting to retain the game’s original style, particularly the visuals.
The biggest challenge for us in raising the resolution was the backgrounds themselves and the effects in them. Originally, these had been created from still images, so there was a lot of work done by hand to the assets we had in order to raise the quality bar. If the original data had been large enough, this would have been a relatively easy process, but the assets we’re working with were created for a game over a decade ago, so we didn’t have a lot of high-resolution source material to work from. We had to find a way to take what we had on hand and work hard to make resolution and other adjustments bit by bit.
We’re told that the developers had to use various editing and manipulation techniques to work around these issues. Elsewhere in the interview, Hirabayashi also said that all the effects had to be redone from scratch. He revealed that the game’s original designer was on board to personally overlook everything.
With regard to the controls, Hirabayashi said that his team wants to retain the difficulty of the original control scheme, but that they want to accommodate new players as well:
We spent a great deal of time fine tuning everything from the characters’ movement speeds to the button layout in order to replicate as closely as we could the tempo and difficulty of the original control scheme. I think that people who have played the original iteration of this title will much prefer the original controls as that is how the game was initially designed. That said, we know that there is also a portion of the audience who will be experiencing the game for the very first time. For those uninitiated in this series who may be more accustomed to modern 3D games and controls, I imagine they might have a hard time wrapping their heads around the original scheme. By implementing both, we are able to bring new players in without making sweeping changes to the overall difficulty.
Resident Evil Remastered is scheduled for release in 2015.
[Source: Destructoid]
